Category Archive

UPDATE*: To all my 17 readers (I am proud of you*) – Sorry I have updated this countless times in an attempt to tighten it up.

Antagonist, I was compelled to write a response to your post on Sanguinetti’s Terrorism, which got a little too unruly, so I am posting it here.

The BBC recently aired a Panorama investigation into the BAe scandal. A senior civil servant dropped a bombshell during the programme, describing the pressure that was put on him to halt investigating links to Prince Bandar of the House of Saud, BAe and Downing Street in the autumn of 2006. He was told displeasing Bandar would lead to the Saudis ceasing to cooperate with UK intelligence services on terrorism which could have led to untold numbers of UK citizens dying on our streets in terrorist attacks.

The investigations were dropped but in the meantime British taxpayers have been funding Bandar’s jet set lifestyle to the tune of several million UK£££s each year since the 1980’s. The British government promised to deliver us from terror but in actuality this is how it protects us. Once this would have been a scandal but not anymore! The incident illustrates the point that Sanguinetti makes, “Our general and the other strategists of the high political police also know that spectacular terrorism is always anti-proletarian, and that it is the pursuit of politics by other means: pursuit, however, of the anti-proletarian politics of all States.”

While Guy Debord points out the dangers of such tangled webs of deceit:

“So it is that thousands of plots in favor of the established order tangle and clash almost everywhere, as the overlap of secret networks and secret issues or activities grows ever more dense along with their rapid integration into every sector of economics, politics and culture. In all areas of social life the degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and security activities gets greater and greater. The general plot having thickened to so that it is almost out in the open, each part of it now starts to interfere with, or worry, the others. All these professional conspirators are spying on each other without really knowing why, are colliding by chance and yet not identifying each other with any certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate aims can only be seen with great difficulty and almost never understood. So that while no one can say he is not being tricked or manipulated, it is only in rare instances that the manipulator himself can know if he is a winner. And in any case, to be on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has chosen the right strategic perspective. Tactical successes can thus lead great powers down dangerous roads.”

So I found myself perusing Debord’s criticisms of Sanguinetti’s text and then I had to reread Spectacle of the Society. Since then, Lenin’s Tomb has been expounding on conspiracy theories, and particularly 911 conspiracy theories, as a diversionary tactic of the ruling class. Debord pointed out how the Spectacle invites such endless commentary by we, the passive spectators, and how the discourse of power is a one-way dialogue in which everything is reduced to mere appearance (in this situation – the appearance of freedom of speech); there are things that cannot be said because they are bound to spoil the party.

You can discuss the conspiracy theory that some fanatical Arab men funded by the evil cave-dwelling Osama bin Laden conspired to fly planes into the Twin Towers and kill 3000 US citizens. This is an apparently acceptable truth because it is the official truth. You cannot, however, discuss why certain privileged white males residing in the US and the UK might want to see those towers come down or how that dreadful event enabled them to massacre one million Iraqis for oil and hegemony!

You can also make the case for how seeking to unravel what happened on September 11th has become heretical and that those who persist in trying to bring to light the nefarious deeds of those who have benefited from 911 are now engaging in useless dialogue because there is no way to ascertain the truth (this “truth” which only becomes something of relevance because it has been FOUGHT for). Do we have to wait for declassification in 30 years? And is this not bowing to ruling class demands that this dialogue be based on the factual record which we know they are more than happy to corrupt and redact? LT weakly argues that such lies will be impossible to untangle and further, his main point, they are diverting us from the task of fighting the institutions that perpetuate human suffering, human terror.

That’s Noam Chomsky’s line too, which is essentially an anarchist position (not a socialist one, I am perplexed that LT the Socialist advocates this line some 4 years after Chomsky’s book on 9-11). Pray tell when have anarchists ever usurped the institutions in the history of anarchist struggle? When people on the left join with those on the right in attempting to squash the search for truth about something as pivotal as 911 and the subsequent war on terror, Debord’s analysis that these competing ideologies are part of the Spectacle is borne out. Changing the institutions has a nice ring to it but it is futile, nothing short of recognizing that we don’t need them will suffice – however, that’s a truth too far.

Ex-MI5 Whistleblower – Annie Machon on complacency around 9-11

To my mind 911 is the single most important event to have transpired in my life time and for that reason alone, I want to know what happened. The media have in no way attempted to answer the questions I have about what happened that day. If an investigator, after analyzing footage of the twin towers collapsing, then demonstrates that there is no way aeroplanes flying into them could have caused them to collapse on their own foot print, is that a conspiracy theory? That’s an attempt to discover what happened, surely? Those non-officials who have examined the collapse are looking at the same material the 9-11 commission contemplated and they are coming up with different conclusions. How so? Is it because the Commission chose to ignore certain annoying details because they did not fit in with the official truth?

Facts like the collapse of Building 7, or how kerosene that was able to melt the building trusses into molten pools of steel despite the fact that it burns at a lower temperature than that needed to cause steel to melt, and other facts about how office furniture that met with US fire safety regulations (i.e had to be resistant to fire) was able to burn and be turned to dust stand out as annoying details that to date pundits both bloggers and professional journalists keep shtum about.

The Spectacle can’t handle it, so it is not discussed. The very act of mentioning this then becomes a revolutionary act. Calling for people to shut up about it and get on with the task at hand, i.e. overthrowing the state (for whom or what, I ask) is no different to those reporters embedded with the US military who ask us to to trust them even though they are not reporting the whole truth because Saddam is a very bad man. Do we really need a new layer of very bossy white men to come in and sort out the mess for the rest of us? Who tell us we are not thinking right thoughts? Is this not where we are being led by such apathy towards truth and power?

Where were all these anti-conspiracy theorists when the US and UK were selling Iraq’s WMD? That is the most huge fucking conspiracy, leave out the theory part because we know who did what, when, where and why!

In the meantime, 911 is a sacred truth, always called upon by our leaders to justify the sickening carnage meted out on innocent people in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine; to convince us that rolling back civil liberties is for our own good and to stir up the reactionary forces of racism and xenophobia. It’s the only way to keep you safe to shop, for God’s sake… get out there and shop! Didn’t Bush say that a day or so after 3000 people died? “We have to fight them there to be safe here” to enjoy the Spectacle of the endless production of images and commodities that distinguish this way of life from those poor bastards being dragged from the scene of another car bomb on a stretcher to a hospital that has a generator providing electricity and no anaethetic since March 2003.

Sanguinetti and Debord were well aware of conspiracies and this document outlines some startling events that took place in Italy that point to the ruling class engineering events to achieve outcomes, not so different from those who sat down and put their signatures to various PNAC documents which proclaimed that nothing short of a new Pearl Harbour would bring in the new American Century. Then it was only a short step to create it, just like Pearl Harbour or the Reichstag fire.

Why the horror in saying in our own lifetimes that the State is ruthlessness enough to kill it’s own citizens, why wait 30 years to do so? The British State has shown it is quite capable of aiding and abetting the cold-blooded murder and torture of Iraqi people, it’s prepared to send it’s own men to die in a war that it’s subjects did not have the stomach for, how much different is it to kill it’s own citizens to achieve it’s objectives? How can we forget the IRA bombs and the fact that the public were never warned by officials despite the IRA transmitting warnings to the police. We could be forgiven for thinking that the State would have wasted no time in capitalizing on the deaths of a few citizens that it had allowed to occur.

Sanguinetti points to some ruling class tactics that will confuse us further. He says it is far easier to attack a simulated enemy than a real one and:

“…for the real enemy, the proletariat, power would like to refuse it even the status of enemy: if workers declare themselves to be against this demented terrorism, then “they are with the State,” if they are against the State, then “they are terrorists,” that is to say enemies of the common good, public enemies. And against a public enemy, everything is permitted, everything is authorised.”

The principal war is being carried out against the proletariat disguised as a war on Muslims. So in timely fashion a poll is conducted prior to the anniversary of the July 7th bombing which reveals that UK Muslims are highly skeptical of the war on terror and the government’s role in 7/7 – a quarter of those polled believed that government agents were involved with the terrorist attacks on 7/7 to howls of disbelief among the establishment’s scribes who opine that they find it difficult to believe (Muslim) people still believe this.

“One thing I’ve always tried to stress is the point that the mujahideen that are coming in from Britain should strike at the heart of the enemy which is within its own country, within Britain.

“Those mujahideen that are coming from America should strike, again, at the heart of America and I have always been in favour of this.”

That was in 2002. This has been followed by other cold rationalizations for terrorism in the West but his latest career move, following a damascene moment, sees Butt giving up terrorism to write for the Guardian!

Like thousands of other young British Muslims, [Butt] became exposed to some of the most radical Imams in Britain – Imams who supported attacks on westerners all over the world and believed that they had a tacit agreement with the British authorities.

They could preach hatred, they could recruit followers, they could raise funds, and they could even call for Jihad – Holy war – as long as they didn’t call for attacks on British soil. London became such a safe haven for Muslim militants that it came to be known as “Londonistan.”

“Do you think this was an unspoken deal with the establishment? That, do whatever you want here as long as you don’t blow us up?” Simon asks Butt.

“Absolutely. I believe that sincerely,” Butt tells Simon. “That was an unspoken deal. And as a result of that, what tended to happen is the British government lost count of how many people were going abroad getting trained and coming back and going into operational mode as sleeper cells.”

If there was such a deal, it was shattered in July 2005, when the four suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London subway; three of the terrorists were born in Britain of Pakistani parents.

Hints of the connection of MI6 to Islamic terror networks. Is that why Butt has not been charged under the Terrorsim Act 2000 despite admitting to recruiting individuals for terrorism and his open incitement of terrorism?

In the meantime, Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP confidently asserts that the BNP are one crisis away from power. It seems that Nulabour are doing their best to bring this crisis about.

It is clear now that the media need not be concerned with presenting facts, these organs can print pretty much whatever they like, claims such as “45 minutes to WMD” are followed by hand-wringing mea culpas the next only to be topped by fantastical plots of bombs that can be constructed easily from ingredients found in an ordinary kitchen. No journalist need ever fear the response of an outraged public.

It is only necessary to believe as passionately in today’s hand-wringing mea culpa as one did in yesterday’s passionate defense of the war to rid Iraq of WMD, to nobly and selflessly bringing democracy and enlightenment to the people of Iraq. The public, we are told, have the memory of a goldfish and won’t remember what happened 3 seconds ago. That’s what they like to think but the news cycle is designed to turn over stories at such a vast speed, it is the media that is unable to recall what happened 3 seconds ago. So we can watch a BBC journalist pointing to Building 7 (Saloman Brothers Building) in the background of a New York skyline, proclaiming that Building 7 had collapsed when in actual fact it is still standing and clearly visible behind her. It collapsed some 20 minutes later, conveniently onto it’s own footprint!

Has the BBC to date offered a satisfactory explanation for this extraordinary act of premonition by one of their journalists?

There will be no mourning of the truth within the pages of their holy tributes to anorexic celebs and blatant propaganda, so why should they care if the public suspend all credulity when presented with the next plot? We all know the story will unravel as more details surface.

A similar poll carried out among other groups would have discovered similar levels of doubt as for instance in New York, following 911, a majority of New Yorkers expressed the view that the government knew about the impending attacks on the Twin Towers and allowed them to be carried out. Opinions that are borne out by documents published by the Project for a New American Century documents two years before 911, which argued that for the US to dominate the world “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” needed to happen.

In the UK it fell on Michael Meacher to address this in the press (This War on Terrorism is Bogus) and since then the whiff of whacko conspiracy theorist has attached itself to him. Saying the unthinkable in the society of the spectacle is never a good career move.

Elsewhere in the media, verisimilitude was given to stories of passports belonging to Saudi hijackers found lying on the streets of New York following the fireball that was intense enough to melt steel trusses of the Twin Towers but, inexplicably, not paper passports… That’s broadcastable, but reasonable doubts about the Spectacle will not be allowed to enter that one way discourse on power and on consumption of the image of the twin towers collapsing.

Even if the State had not engineered the terrorist attacks, it certainly has not been shy in capitalizing on them. Afterwards, Donald Rumsfeld advertised the formation of the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, which he said would provoke terrorist attacks, then requiring “counter-terror” reprisals by the US on countries harbouring terrorists.

Secrecy

It is necessary to ensure that “ .. the spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.” (Debord) and by this standard it is then permitted to execute Brazilians in the underground or shoot Muslims in their homes. Today it is Muslims who have had their most basic right to life overturned by the State in the name of protecting citizens from terrorism.

Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (part of our Human Rights Act) protects the right to life and places onerous obligations on the State to protect the lives of all us. This principle places tight limitations on the use of deliberate and lethal force.

Such action is the gravest of steps in a democracy. It can only ever be justified where “absolutely necessary”; where there is no other way of effectively protecting the lives of others.

Even in the context of a suspected suicide bomber, Article 2 requires that everything possible is done to avoid a moment where lethal force is the only viable means of preventing the suspect from detonating a device and bringing injury and death to others. However, there may be situations where lethal force is the only means of protecting huge loss of life.

Tomorrow it will be everyone else

When all the laws of the State are in danger, “there only exists for the State one sole and inviolable law: the survival of the State.” It is interesting how every terrorist act has occurred just when that survival looked tenuous, when the state was in crisis and rocked by scandal. Harpies Blair, Blunkett or Reid would shriek of impending terrorist attacks and it mattered not one jot to the supine media that no evidence, intelligence or facts were presented.

“The only attack capable of fatally wounding the State is today uniquely that which consists of denouncing its terrorist practices, and violently denouncing them.”

Think Madrid.

We Need More Attacks on American Soil

“In his first interview as the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan told a reporter that America needs to be attacked by terrorists so that people will appreciate the work that President Bush has done to protect the country. ‘At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001],’ Milligan said to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country.’”

Another salient point, these acts of terror are like a drug and must be managed because each new act looks less terrifying than the one preceding it. Nothing can compare to 911 and since 7/7/05 acts of terror in the UK have now been reduced to the constant streaming of farcical spectacles of exploding cars driving into airport terminals (no doubt aided and abetted by the technologically superior Iran) or Somalis looking ominously out of the media, suspected of plots uncovered by mind-readers which is enough to ensure that they are held behind bars for 28 days awaiting their day in a kangaroo court and all relayed to us by breathless commentators on 24 hour news channels.

This latest Piccadilly/Glasgow incident became a full scale terrorist event within a day, it was enough to cause disruption to the fourteen thousand spectators that were waiting to watch the matches at Wimbledon in person and don’t mention the people taking flights that weekend, in what has now become an annual disruption preceding the anniversary of July 7th. Details were leaked slowly on a continuous loop. Gas canisters, we were informed, were being carried in a Mercedes that had crashed. The gas canisters became a device. The upgrading to a device was followed by the news that there were nails involved and it was inevitable that a demonstration of the lethality of this device was followed the next day at Glasgow Airport in an event that killed exactly nobody. Fortunately. While in Iraq real car bombs continue to detonate killing scores of people on a daily basis. In the meantime a suicide letter was recovered from the burnt-out Cherokee at Glasgow Airport, proving once again that the fiendish Al Qaeda are more competent at making fire-proof paper than bombs.

Thus demonstrating another truism from Sanguinetti’s pamphlet – that it is essential bloodless rehearsals for future acts of terrorism are carried out first. These acts are mere rehearsals preparing the public for future spectacles.

“Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them.” James Denselow, Iraq specialist, Chatham House

Iraqi firefighters evacuate a burned body from the site of a car bomb explosion at a market in Baghdad’s al-Sadriyah neighborhood, April 18, 2007 Ahmad al-Rubaye / AFP / Getty

Bush administration officials have been using the drop in Iraqi fatalities as proof that the surge is working and leading to defused tensions between the Sunnis and Shias. What they don’t tell you is that the figures they cite do not include Iraqis killed by car bombs. The fatalities they count are the dead bodies that turn up on streets which they attribute to “sectarian murders” and not the death squads which freely roam the environs of Baghdad armed with US provided Gluck pistols and shiny new vehicles courtesy of the US taxpayer, in particular the Wolf Brigade.

“We would go into a Sunni town, cordon the town, search it [and] confiscate weapons. The searches would go great because [of the] American presence. We would leave, and the Wolf Brigade went back in that night and started kidnapping and killing people, [and] burned a couple of houses down.” U.S. Army Maj. Charles Miller, advisor to the Wolf Brigade in Iraq

Don’t forget that the death squads and the US helped stoke these sectarian killings and right now the US is hard at work building a five-kilometer “neighbourhood wall” of 3.5-meter-high concrete blocks around Adhamiya which will close off the largest Sunni neighbourhood in Baghdad from surrounding areas completely, making the ethnicization of the conflict physical.

The U.S. military described the wall as “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence,” in a statement. But few Iraqis agreed.

“Surrounding areas of the capital with barbed wire and concrete blocks would harm these areas economically and socially,” said the Islamic Party, a predominantly Sunni formation. “In addition, it will enhance sectarian feelings. This will cause great damage to the neighborhood’s residents and have a negative effect on these areas instead of solving problems. It will deepen the gap between the people and encourage sectarianism.”

Whatever happens to the wall around Adhamiya, the U.S. military isn’t likely to abandon its strategy of carving up Baghdad neighborhoods.

“The U.S. military is walling off at least 10 of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods and using biometric technology to track some of their residents, creating what officers call ‘gated communities’ in an attempt to carve out oases of safety in this war-ravaged city,” reported the Washington Post.

“In some sealed-off areas, troops armed with biometric scanning devices will compile a neighborhood census by recording residents’ fingerprints and eye patterns, and will perhaps issue them special badges, military officials said.”

The logic is simple, according to one U.S. military officer: “If we keep the bad guys out, then we win.”

The logic is simple but flawed. Riverbend poignantly recalls Baghdad before the war, “One could live anywhere. We didn’t know what our neighbors were- we didn’t care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.” The wall will only make matters worse. See Warsaw Ghetto.

Google Earth photo of Adhamiya Neighbourhood (see here for full picture as above image needs to be resized to appear correctly in blog.) The Wall was begun on April 10th and is currently being built overnight by US troops despite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s order to stop.

There will only be one entrance into and out of Adhamiya and biometric passports will be used to check the identity of everyone entering and leaving.

The red X shows where the Sarafiya Bridge once graced the Tigris River until it was recently destroyed in an an attack on the Green Zone. Now see following map:

It is quite obvious that somebody wants to isolate the Sunni. There will be no escape routes for the Sunni of Adhamiya should they need to flee an attack by Maliki forces.

In the meantime, while the number of tortured bodies being found dumped on the streets is down the number of Iraqis killed by car bombs has risen.

That’s not a significant drop but a rise! Meanwhile, deaths in Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, have risen.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths — the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders — as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

But the number of people killed in explosive attacks is rising, the same statistics show — up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.

Overall, statistics indicate that the number of violent deaths has declined significantly since December, when 1,391 people died in Baghdad, either executed and found dead on the street or killed by bomb blasts. That number was 796 in March and 691 through April 24.

Nearly all of that decline, however, can be attributed to a drop in executions, most of which were blamed on Shiite Muslim militias aligned with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Much of the decline occurred before the security plan began on Feb. 15, and since then radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army militia to stand down.

According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and to 473 in March.

Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

In that same period, the number of bombings has increased, as well. In December, there were 65 explosive attacks. That number was unchanged in January, but it rose to 72 in February, 74 in March and 81 through April 24.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government refuses to hand over to the UN it’s civilian casualty numbers because they fear that the statistics would be used to undermine the work of the USUK coalition. The UN released a report citing it’s own figures which claimed that despite the surge, sectarian violence for February and March was high, contradicting Bush administration officials and Bush who in a recent interview made the following incoherent comments on the war in Iraq:

I mean, there is an acceptable level of violence in certain societies around the world. And the question is, you know, what is that level? That’s where the experts come in. You know, you and I can’t determine that sitting here in New York, but we can ask people’s advice upon it. David Petraeus is — would have an opinion on that. Ryan Crocker, our ambassador in Iraq. That’s a very interesting way of putting the question. Because all — there is an acceptable level of violence in all societies. Even our own. President George W Bush

“Petraeus is being given a losing hand, I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the wrong direction. The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly intelligent and creative…. I’m sure he’ll say to himself, ‘I’m not going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.’ ”Gen. Barry McCaffrey. “

The longer the coalition remain, the more Iraqis that will get killed.

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

But during his recent PBS interview with Charlie Rose, the plans changed. Visible improvements are no longer one of the benchmarks as Iraqis clearly have a higher tolerance of violence.

ROSE: There is no question on their part and on your part that catastrophe worse than it is today is inevitable if there’s not a political solution and if the United States pulls out in the near term.

BUSH: Well, first of all, you said this is a catastrophe worse today. You know, it is….

ROSE: Well, there’s sectarian violence that is of a certain level.

BUSH: It is, but it’s significantly lower than it was a couple of months ago.

ROSE: And is there an acceptable level of violence?

BUSH: Well, that’s the question to the Iraqi people. That’s a fascinating question. I mean, there is an acceptable level of violence in certain societies around the world. And the question is, you know, what is that level? That’s where the experts come in. You know, you and I can’t determine that sitting here in New York, but we can ask people’s advice upon it. David Petraeus is — would have an opinion on that. Ryan Crocker, our ambassador in Iraq. That’s a very interesting way of putting the question. Because all — there is an acceptable level of violence in all societies. Even our own.

ROSE: And where do you…

BUSH: Even though all violence needs to be abhorred — nevertheless, there is, you know, there’s certain violence, levels of violence that people say, well, gosh, I can go about my life, I’ve got…

ROSE: We can’t create zero violence is what you’re saying.

BUSH: Well — and by the way, if the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory. In other words, if you say, you know, I’m going to judge the administration’s plan based upon whether they’re able to have no car bombings in Baghdad. We will have just given — because car bombings are hard to stop, or suicide bombings, very hard to stop.

We have just given Al Qaida or any other extremist a significant victories. And that’s one of the problems I face in trying to convince the American people, one, this is doable. In other words, I wouldn’t have our troops there if I didn’t think this is, one, important; and secondly, achievable.

But I also understand on their TV screens, people are saying horrific bombings, and they’re saying to themselves, is this possible? Can we possibly succeed in the face of this kind of violence? And that’s where this enemy, the enemy of moderation, has got a, you know, they’ve got a powerful tool (inaudible).

Bush thinks that the media are handing the enemies of moderation a powerful tool by broadcasting the reality of everyday car-bombings and violence in Iraq. Focusing on suicide bombings is handing Al Qaida (the base) a significant victory? In other words, not only is the “surge” not working but Bush is losing the perception war. He knows it. We know it. So why is he sending yet more US soldiers to die in Iraq? Why does he vainly continue to sell the Iraq war to the American public as winnable? +650,000 deaths later… His sociopathology is matched by his wife’s:

“Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.”

Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst with 27 years of experience asks Rumsfeld, "I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people, why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kinds of casualties? why?"

QUESTION: So I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people, why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary, that has caused these kinds of casualties? why?

RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, I haven’t lied. I did not lie then. Colin Powell didn’t lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. the president spent weeks and weeks with the central intelligence people and he went to the american people and made a presentation. i’m not in the intelligence business. they gave the world their honest opinion. it appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

QUESTION: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and –

QUESTION: You said you knew where they were Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

RUMSFELD: My words — my words were that — no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

QUESTION: This is America.

RUMSFELD: You’re getting plenty of play, sir.

QUESTION: I’d just like an honest answer.

RUMSFELD: I’m giving it to you.

QUESTION: Well we’re talking about lies and your allegation there was bulletproof evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.

RUMSFELD: Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.

QUESTION: Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That’s also…

RUMSFELD: He was also in Baghdad.

QUESTION: Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital.

Come on, these people aren’t idiots. They know the story.

(PROTESTER INTERRUPTS)

RUMSFELD: Let me give you an example.

It’s easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style?

(LAUGHTER)

They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons.

(APPLAUSE)

Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously. He’d used them on his neighbor (AUDIO GAP) the Iranians, and they believed he had those weapons.

We believed he had those weapons.

QUESTION: That’s what we call a non sequitur. It doesn’t matter what the troops believe; it matters what you believe.

MODERATOR: I think, Mr. Secretary, the debate is over. We have other questions, courtesy to the audience.